Microsoft is retiring the product name Dynamics 365 Marketing and will rebrand most of the current capabilities as part of Dynamics 365 Customer Insight, the company has announced.

“Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing are coming together as one offering named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an AI driven solution which will revolutionize your customers experiences,” wrote Jim Nakashima, Microsoft partner general manager for D365 Marketing and Customer Insights.

As a result of the change, the new D365 Customer Insights will now have two elements, Data and Journeys. “Customer Insights – Data” will be the name of the existing Customer Insights solution and it will function primarily as a customer data platform that provides an organization with a 360-degree view of their customers. The product that had been known as D365 Marketing will be known as “Customer Insights – Journeys”. The new offering will be available for purchase starting on September 1, according to information shared by Microsoft.

Bringing both marketing and customer data under one brand will align with Microsoft’s product vision, the company says. Customers will be able to run campaigns based on customer entities stored in Dataverse or based on profiles stored in Customer Insights from other sources. 

Presenting the two applications under a single brand could help Microsoft present a more unified vision to the market, says Thomas Manders, managing director at Microsoft partner Coffee + Dunn. 

Microsoft is looking to build on the success of both Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (CI).  The combination of the two products certainly makes sense; it brings together the customer data platform (CDP) in CI and Real Time Marketing (RTM) in Marketing. The matchup enables the full scope of data clients need to optimally engage their customers around the events, behaviors, actions that both reflect their interests and the way each prefers to interact with the client’s business. 

Done well, this approach can create a more connected customer experience, leveraging interactions from any system at any point during the customer’s lifecycle.

Microsoft had previously communicated a plan to retire D365 Marketing’s older “outbound” marketing module in favor of the newer “real-time” marketing capabilities, and “Customer Insights – Journeys” will continue that plan. For existing D365 Marketing customers, the transition from outbound to real-time marketing will continue as part of the product change. Starting in August 2023, new customers will only have access to real-time marketing capabilities. Existing customers can continue to use outbound marketing, but Microsoft will not be adding any enhancements.

“Real-time marketing has already surpassed traditional outbound marketing in functionality, effectiveness, usability testing results, satisfaction surveys. Moreover, our innovations and upcoming AI features are available exclusively in real-time marketing,” Nakashima wrote.

Microsoft’s 2023 Release Wave 2 plans still includes a section for D365 Marketing separate from Customer Insights.

This is not the first time Microsoft has ended a Dynamics marketing product’s life. Veterans of the Microsoft business applications space probably remember the ill-fated MDM-based “Microsoft Dynamics Marketing” that was acquired as MarketingPilot in 2012, de-listed for new sales in 2016, and then discontinued in 2018 after failing to fulfill its R&D plans or to gain market traction. Today’s D365 Marketing took shape in 2018 branded as “Dynamics 365 for Marketing” as a more traditional marketing automation product that Microsoft built from scratch on the same Power Platform data and application services that the rest of the Dynamics 365 Customer Experience suite used.

D365 Marketing will officially be folded into Customer Insights later in 2023, and after that it will be sold as a single offering encompassing both elements. Nakashima wrote that the combined solution will offer a “40 percent savings on the base license offer compared to previous packaging.” The existing offerings each start at $1,500 per tenant per month when purchased as a “first app”. The new combined price will be $1,700 per tenant per month and $1,000 as a “subsequent app”. “Subsequent” here means a scenario in which the customer is paying for another Dynamics app as a first app.

Customer Insights will also introduce a simplified capacity model for additional charges above the tenant cost and base level of capacity. Whereas the previous model had four capacity units, the new model has only two: People Interacted (equivalent to the previous “marketable contact” unit in D365 Marketing) and People Unified (equivalent to the previous “profile” meter in Dynamics 365 Customers Insights).

Manders explained that existing customers will have additional time and options to plan their transition to the new pricing and licensing model. 

Clients will still be able to license the two products independently and extend their current licensing for the foreseeable future. Still, licensing is rarely straightforward with integrated platforms, and this is no different; investment for features like landing pages or event portals via Power Pages or Microsoft Teams licenses for virtual events still need to be considered. Even so, the new licensing appears to be less constraining than the current model. 

Microsoft MVP Megan Walker writes that the transition to the new Customer Insights should not be difficult for existing Marketing customers. But the challenges of the transition from outbound to real-time marketing remain, she stated, and reminded readers of her series of blog posts on the topic.

And Manders told us that while this transition may require some adjustment for existing D365 Marketing customers, they should benefit from the renewed focus on data and business alignment. 

The change is a departure from something that is typically more intuitive for marketers, especially those looking for marketing automation. But Microsoft is in a great position to change the discussion around data-driven customer engagement and in some ways, use this evolution to accelerate the alignment of sales and marketing teams and elevate the importance of accurate customer data.